Epistemographer

Dan Froomkin offers the best concise read on the election that I’ve seen:

So maybe on Nov. 2, Americans won’t be voting for presidential candidates as much as for competing realities.

The best summary I’ve seen of yesterday’s political events:
Okay, students of the White House, what did we learn yesterday?
1) Senior administration officials can make remarks on a not-for-attribution basis to the press — but the White House can later decide to make the attribution public if it can help discredit said senior administration official-turned-whistle-blower.
2) When [...]

This is exciting – Dan Froomkin, my old boss from washingtonpost.com just started writing a daily media round-up column called White House Briefing. Dan’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met when it comes to the intersection of politics, journalism, and new media, and I can’t think of anyone better to tackle this sort [...]

A newspaper story:
Flags are still flying along the neat blocks of bungalows on the border of Cleveland and Euclid. Shops still carry signs urging all who pass to “support our troops.”
And for the moment, at least, George Bush seems to be a part of the patriotic tableau, an ominous sign for the Democrats. Even some [...]

David Brooks’ advice to Republicans for their NYC convention next fall:
This week I read that you have abandoned plans to house Republicans safely on a cruise ship off the island of Manhattan during the G.O.P. convention in New York this summer. Have you paused to consider what this will mean?
It will mean that instead of [...]

Great article on Joe Trippi (Howard Dean’s campaign manager) in The New Republic online. I won’t excerpt any here, but go read the article. It’s a great profile of a case where vision and ideas drove technology use, rather than the other way around…

So, many people are blogging this better than I have the time or knowledge to do, but if you’ve been in a cave today, Atrios was essentially served with a cease and desist letter by blogger Donald Luskin today.
Seems that this might not be about simply stifling criticism, a la Fox v. Franken, but something [...]

As a scholar who’s sensitive both to historiography and contemporary media criticism, I’m well aware that for the vast majority of the world, those who don’t get to go into archives or interview historical actors firsthand, history only exists in the telling. We labor to make our work transparent, extensively documenting our work in part [...]

How ironic is this: someone twisting the notion of social construction in the name of political gain, in the process unintentionally (or perhaps intentially) engaging in the very sort of social construction which he denounces. It’s either brilliant, or idiocy (I’m leaning toward the latter).

In this week’s New Yorker, there’s a letter to the editor that reads, in part:
“…After September 11, 2001, Bush told the American people that the terrorist attacks were the work of those who hated freedom and democracy. By also characterizing the Iraq conflict as a war in defense of those values, he drew a straight [...]